by Mary Astor
“Well, I don’t know exactly how to say it, but——” She chewed on the ball of her thumb. “I mean—I’ve gotten over acting in certain ways, like, well, walking once in a while instead of always running. And—I don’t like it if my hands are dirty, and I want to wash them before I eat. And a lot of things don’t seem quite so hilarious as they used to—oh, I don’t know!” She squirmed a little in the chair, and her eyes roved to the ceiling.
“And Charlie?” Walter quietly led her.
“Well—like when we did our English theme paper last June—Charlie’s was real good. Actually better than mine, but when he turned it in he had drawn scallops and silly decorations all over the margins. The kind of thing we both used to do—oh, maybe years ago. Like in the fourth grade.” She paused, her thoughts deep in that, to her, distant past.
The moment was precious to Walter. Carefully he measured the gift of her confidence and chose his words to avoid any sound of paternal condescension.
“Honey, girls take an awfully big jump ahead of us males at your age—you know that.”
Virginia looked at him with a quick smile, the circles under her dark eyes betraying her most recent brush with nature.
“Oh, I don’t mean just that,” Walter said hurriedly, “but in every way: the way you think, the way you feel.”
“I don’t want to be ‘biggety,’ Dad—I know what you mean—I think. I feel quieter, I think quieter—most of the time. And I like being with Betty and Cheryl more than I used to. Ho!” she laughed. “It makes Charlie so mad sometimes. I tell him he ought to take Elsie out to the raft and help her learn to dive better. She still doesn’t keep her knees and ankles tight—flops like a fish.” Walter’s quiet puffing brought her back to the fact that she had digressed.
“It isn’t the difference between Charlie and me, Dad, it’s the difference between Charlie and other boys.”
Walter almost bit his pipe in two. His body tensed in every muscle, and he felt the hard thumping of his heart. What in heaven’s name was the girl getting at? What had she seen? He was aware of his son’s rather too perfect good looks, but he had never thought of him as soft. On the contrary, he seemed to lack even normal concern and caution against physical injury, for instance. There wasn’t a gesture or an attitude that was “precious.” As a very young child he was always disregarding obstacles; skinned knees and elbows were matters of no concern. Once, he remembered, at the top of the veranda stairs the child, in his eagerness to retrieve a ball that he had thrown, had disregarded the concrete steps and simply “taken off,” and for days carried around a scab on his nose and chin. It was true, there had been a “normal” period of tantrums, of screaming when he was opposed, but they were short stormy sessions that disappeared as quickly as they had come on. He seemed to carry no grudges, his sunny smile dissolved the protruding lip of sulkiness.
Walter kept his voice calm, objectively interested.
“In what way, Virgie?”
Virginia hesitated. This was dangerously close to disloyalty, she realized. She had never “told on” her brother. Neither her father nor her mother required one of the children to tell about the misdeeds of another. “Talk about your own faults,” the beam in one’s own eye, had been impressed on them very early.
Walter saw her thoughts and smiled. “It’s all right, honey,” he said, “we’re talking about Charlie as a person, not about something he has done that is punishable.”
“Well, boys like Roger and Toby and Joe—lots of others—kids he was real good friends with, act—well, not scared, exactly, but they just don’t seem to like him, because they don’t know what he’s going to do next. Like one day, they were playing some catch game with a medicine ball, round in a big circle. Charlie could throw it just as good and fast and hard as the rest of them—but, for no reason at all, once when he got the ball he just pitched it up toward the class window, and Jimmy Bleeker or somebody said, ‘Hey, what’s the idea,’ or something like that, and somebody else said, ‘If you’da broke that window we’d all be in trouble,’ and Charlie just grinned and said, ‘We would?’—not sarcastic or anything, just like it didn’t matter to him. Oh,” she wailed a little, “that’s not—that doesn’t show what I mean. I know he’s smart and strong—if I didn’t know he was really bright, I mean, I’d think the way he acts sometimes, that he just wasn’t growing up at all. I mean——” It was just too hard to put into words, this vague feeling of her own irritability with him, of the blows to her pride, when small eyebrows were raised.
Walter, relieved, raised another lighted match to his pipe. “Let’s put it this way, honey. Maybe you’re not taking into account the fact that everybody’s different—unique, is the word that says more exactly what I mean. And you have to watch out about deciding that because Charlie isn’t becoming the kind of person you think he ought to be, or others think he ought to be, he isn’t growing up at all. Maybe he’s just a good, healthy non-conformist—sometimes they can be quite interesting, although not always comfortably acceptable.” He chuckled to himself, while Virginia watched, letting it pass, because the discussion had begun to make her sleepy, and she wasn’t sure what her father was talking about.
Walter was still listening to himself, rather than communicating with his daughter. “Rebels—it takes a lot of courage to get out of a groove. To believe in something enough to change the world as a lot of our own ancestors did.”
Virginia gave up trying to smother a yawn, and through it she said, “But, Daddy, rebels feel something. Charlie just doesn’t seem to care.”
“You’re sleepy, kiddo, and I care enough for you to say, ‘Off to bed’—and thanks for the chess game, you’re just getting too smart to handle.” He kissed the girl affectionately and she slipped out of the room, stretching her young arms and yawning prodigiously.
Rebels feel something. Walter carried the phrase to bed with him.
In her own room Virginia’s yawns continued as she slid into the big bed beside her sister. Elsie flopped over and turned on the bed lamp on her side, peering at the clock with a “Gosh!”
“You been asleep?” asked Virginia.
“A while,” replied Elsie. She pulled out a handful of Kleenex and blew her nose loudly.
“Oh, not again—you catching another cold?” said Virginia, and then, noticing Elsie’s flushed cheeks, exclaimed, “You been crying?”
“Yes, I’ve been being silly, thinking how wonderful the summer has been, and all the fun we’ve had—and pretty soon it will be fall—and—and——” And the tears started streaming again.
Virginia pulled the girl over onto her shoulder and patted the blonde head. “What’s the matter, Elsie, tell me what’s wrong with it being fall?”
Elsie strangled her words. “Just us not being together—— You and Charlie going to different schools and me being left in the same one——”
Virginia said, “You are a baby! You know this is no surprise. Charlie’s always been enrolled at Haverly and me at Miss Penn’s and that’s where you’ll come when you get out of eighth grade too.”
“But I got so used to us—going together and coming home together——”
“Now, we didn’t always, silly—boy, you are a leaner, you and Charlie both——”
“I am not a ‘leaner.’ ” Virginia had succeeded in stopping her tears by the argument. “Charlie is though. Like when they skipped him in second grade, because he made such a fuss that he couldn’t be with his darling sister!” It was an old discussion.
“That wasn’t the reason,” Virginia said defensively, “Charlie was just bright—he still is—brighter than me—than I.”
There was the sound of the door opening and Beatrice, in a blue peignoir, had an admonishing finger on her lips. “Are you girls going to talk half the night again? You ought to be asleep. Do you want some cornflakes or a glass of milk maybe?”
She made mothering noises and patted the sheets into place. Virginia had stiffened out and shut her eyes tight. “I�
�m practically asleep, Mum—we’ll be quiet—go back to bed.”
Beatrice said, “We’re going to be busy hostesses tomorrow, all of us. And we’ve got to keep aware of our schedules—that’s what makes good parties. And you can’t expect the servants to do your part of it after eleven o’clock. They’ll have their hands full with the buffet.”
The party was to be a combination beach and buffet picnic in honor of the return of the Alden Shelleys to Nelson. The Shelleys had been away in Europe on business for five years, and now with the business of reopening their home out of the way, they were being reabsorbed into the lives of their friends and the colony of beach estates.
Elsie reached up to pat her mother’s face. “Don’t you worry, Mum dear, we’ll keep all the little beasts safely out of the house. No sand in the porcelain!” and she giggled.
Beatrice smiled and shushed them again and was gone.
In the darkness Virginia whispered, “Wouldn’t it be great if Charlie found a real chum in Jeff?”
Elsie whispered back, sleepy now, “Oh, everybody likes Charlie. I hardly remember Jeff—we were so young. But since the Shelleys are near us again, I think we can have a lot of fun together.”
Elsie was a people-person, thoroughly group-minded. To her, the intricacies of relationships were not complicated at all. Her world was expanding and growing, its roots settled firmly in her love of her family, but Virginia, on the contrary, would always be more selective, more apt to perceive the similarities and dissimilarities that would make people be “right” or “not right” for each other. She had been relieved when her mother had stopped trying to make a “cunning little girl” out of her. Bonnets and bows did not become the long solemn face, the deep-set dark eyes. Elsie had fitted the role perfectly; Beatrice had her little doll, whom she could dress up to her heart’s content, leaving Virginia free for the “deep talk” with her father and the pell-mell tomboy relationship with Charlie.
“Everybody likes Charlie,” she agreed, “at first.”
“Oh, Ginn, what are you talking about? Everybody likes Charlie—period.” And her next breath was a soft snore.
Toward morning there had been a brief thunderstorm, but it freshened the day and brightened the lawn above the beach, The flowered umbrella tables blossomed on the stone terrace, the silver glinted, and the glassware sparkled. Down on the beach the children’s fire for their wienie bake was burning down to a fine bed of coals.
There had been no need for Virginia and Elsie to do much “hostessing.” Charlie had skillfully maneuvered the young people away from the attractions of the buffet, built the fire, toted the picnic paraphernalia down to the beach, and Beatrice almost burst with pride when several of her friends had said that he was certainly growing up to be a fine, gentlemanly boy.
By four o’clock the two parties had settled comfortably into their individual sounds and activities, the women happily gossiping, the men discussing the market and smoking cigars and rattling ice in good bourbon.
On the beach, the tide had turned and was snaking its foaming veils higher and higher up onto the sand. Feats of athletic prowess were still going on. Virginia had reloaded her Brownie camera several times and put it away, carefully wrapped in a towel, beside her beach bag. For a moment she was alone and could take a look contentedly at the party as a whole. It was all so wonderful, the lovely summer day—the grownups looking like actors on a stage, far away up on the veranda; the big elms casting a shadow over one end, the bright summer colors of the women’s dresses, their voices barely audible as a tinkling sound in the lulls between the cracking of the waves. And around her the bright orange and reds and blues of the kids’ bathing suits, shifting constantly, the squeals and shrieks and shouting, the never tiring high spirits. Something about it, something of the unchanging preciousness of the moment, made her eyes smart. Her love encircled it all, and most of all her pride in Charlie had been revived. He and Jeff had got along “like a house afire.” Charlie had somehow been able to break down the shyness that had kept Jeff apart at the few encounters at the riding class. Perhaps he had just felt “new” since his return. But Charlie had put himself out to make him a part of the group. He was quick to explain some local joke, some reference to a person or an event that Jeff couldn’t know about. They had paired off in a swimming race to the raft and arrived at a dead heat.
Thinking about Charlie, she suddenly missed him. There had been a very faint sound that had given her goose flesh on her arms and thighs. Somebody was hurt—— Where? Who? Her eyes darted along the groups at the water’s edge, to see who was missing, what piece of the group had been torn away that would make this faint cry of pain. Charlie and Roger Thorne had been “wrastling,” and her inner eye remembered that they had been running, laughing and shouting, toward Berry Pie. Jeff was approaching her, wiping the water from his face. Virginia, standing, stared at him, white-faced. She said only, “Come on!” and raced away down the beach. Jeff had heard nothing but, sensing her fright, sprinted after her.
They rounded the sentinel rocks, plashing through a strip of wave that seemed to slide ahead of them, reaching to point to the scene on the edge of Berry Pie. Fifteen feet away, Virginia and Jeff froze, unable to move or make a sound. Charlie was on top of Roger, holding his ears in his hands, rhythmically banging the now unconscious boy’s head on the side of a rock. There was absolutely no savagery in the action, no passion or hatred, no viciousness. He looked up briefly as he saw Virginia and Jeff and called out a smiling “Hi!” and then went back to his task. Firmly, purposefully, as though he were occupied in cracking a coconut. In the seconds before movement came back to the paralyzed observers another wave whispered up to the two boys and receded with pink in its foam.
Jeff was the first to move and, yelling, he pulled Charlie off the boy. He picked up Roger, carried him gently out of reach of the tide, and deposited him again on the sand, mumbling, “Shouldn’t move him—probably got concussion—have to——” and suddenly there were screams from other kids who had followed Jeff’s and Virginia’s run up the beach, sensing the difference between play and purpose. In a moment the area was alive with both grownups and kids and the broken sentences, the emergency questions. “How did it happen?” “Is he dead?” “Did he fall?” “Get a doctor—Joe, the phone number is on the——” “Charlie, how did——”
Charlie said, “We were wrestling——” and Virginia screamed, “And Roger fell!” Charlie was about to continue, but Virginia’s look startled him and he drew his brows together in a perplexed frown. He watched the activity of the others, alertly, curiously, as though it were a game and he was trying to find out what he was supposed to do. Roger’s father had his shoulder in a hard grip and was brokenly shouting at him, “That boy’s cut in a dozen places—what the hell were you trying to do!” Suddenly all the eyes were turned upon him and he seemed to find the situation unpleasant. There was an indignant glitter in his eyes and he broke out of Thorne’s grip. Striding to the edge of the water, he dug his hands into the wet sand and washed the blood from his palms. There was the sound of a siren in the distance and the group was again turned from him to the injured and deathly quiet boy. The whole situation seemed like a big fuss, he’d been let off the hook, so he turned and began to stride toward the house.
The beauty of the soft summer night, the daylight brilliance of the full moon were lost on the big house, withdrawn and still with shock.
The confusion had died down, and the burden of the amenities of the departure of guests had been on the distraught Beatrice. With her social training and poise, she had been able to dissolve the party quickly and expertly without seeming to rush. The form of the dialogue had such sameness that she could lean on it, without having to use her wits.
“It’s terrible for you, Bea darling. If there’s anything we can do——”
“Thanks, Lucy dear, you’re so kind——”
“Don’t worry, Bea, I’m sure the boy will be all right—kids are tough, you know.�
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“Thanks, Joe—I’ll call Jane in the morning.”
“. . . Let us know . . .”
“Thank you. . . . Good night. . . . I’m sorry—everything—I’m fine . . .” and on and on—and finally to the kitchen to pull the servants together. “Make plenty of sandwiches and coffee—you’d better stay up awhile, Edwin, in case we need anything. No, don’t the rest of you hang around, just go to bed after you’ve cleaned up. And have you finished in the library, because I’m sure Mr. Carewe won’t want you fussing around, there is so much to do.” So much to do—Bill Thorne and Walter had gone to the hospital with Roger—would they say the boy was dead when they got back? It’s been so long—her head was throbbing and the tips of her fingers were numb and cold as she went back into the living room from the pantry, colliding with Elsie.
Almost exploding, she cried, “Elsie, I’ve told you all to just please stay out of the way, I don’t want you rushing around like a lot of stampeding elephants.”
“We will, Mum—I mean we won’t—I just thought I’d get some hot chocolate for you—you’ve had such an awful time, and you look awful tired—really awful!”
The bit of sympathy was too much, and she permitted herself to give in and be put to bed by her small loving daughter, not even complaining when the cold cloth Elsie brought for her pounding head was too wet and dripped back into her ears.
Both Jeff and Virginia had been struck into the kind of inarticulateness that adults judge as an inability to perceive the importance of a situation. They had had a session in the library with Shelley, Sr., trying to pin them down on the exact circumstances. “What was Charlie doing when you got there?” “What did he say?” “What did you do?” Their faces remained expressionless and they seemed to have little to report except what he knew already: “Roger was unconscious and I had to move him away from the water——” “I don’t remember anything about Charlie—he just sort of stood there and watched——”